Even though he did stop just short of being taken in, it is apparent that some of his information was already compromised.
It's not apparent. Dollars to donuts it's far cheaper to send an email targeting a specific bank to a very large number of harvested US email addresses than to somehow find out which email addresses relate to which bank's customers, and send them a targeted email. Emails cost virtually nothing to send.
Also, most large organisms including humans and cows, contain more bacteria cells than human (or cow) cells.
In the muscle tissue itself? On the surface and in the intestinal tract, yes. The meat the hamburger begins "life" as should be sterile. Of course, in the process of being ground up the meat will receive a small amount of bacteria from the surfaces of the equipment and the air, but those surfaces would be washed regularly.
Of course $MEDIA will be used for ideological content if the media is powerful enough. Every developer with an opinion has the potential to imbue their game with their ideological or political inclination. All you need is text to embed political content, e.g. all you would really need is a terminal, which have been around forever. Of course, for political content to do much there must be a sizable audience.
Just off the top of my head, Theatre Europe for c64 had political content (e.g. anti-nuclear war) back in 1986. I'm sure this wasn't the first game with political content by any stretch of the imagination, just a random one from my youth that springs to mind. Virtually any war game where you can be cast only as one side in a historical war could be considered political. Chances are there were somewhat political games created in the 1970s, just the audience was limited. I'd be interested to know what the first such game was.
Even though the bacteria is dead, its still there, no?
Well, yes. Maybe not recognizable as such, since heat can denature the proteins in the cell walls. If we are being that pedantic, I'll argue that since the cow is made up of molecules derived from grass, air and water, hamburgers are an acceptable part of a vegan diet.
I'd spend a lifetime putting wilted lettuce on bacteria-ridden patties of dead cow.
In most places, they cook hamburger (which would destroy most vegetative bacterial cells); wherever this young lady is from they obviously must put the lettuce on the raw burger and then eat it. No wonder she wanted to leave there at all costs! Perhaps that's where she got the barbed wire scar from.
Care to suggest how they differentiate between the thousands of applicants with both grades and standardized testing scores smashed up against the limits of the scales?
It's not as if there are heaps of these students. At the edges of the bell curve where the Ivy Leagues recruit from, there are only a relative few people produced every year. It's not as if MIT, Harvard et al can magically produce geniuses through their great teaching ability, they just select the cream of the crop.
If MIT wanted to differentiate some more, another standardized test would do just as well. The questions on average would need to be very hard, but with varying degrees of difficulty to distinguish accurately whether someone is IQ 135, 140, 145, 150, 155, 160... etc. Since SAT is just a proxy IQ test anyway.
In fact, this is basically a Microsoft style recruiting tool - AFAIK they use a few very hard questions to issue an IQ test. Since they are only after the very best, if you fail they weren't after you anyway, whether you scored 85 or 125, they don't care.
I'm curious - what do you have against FTFY jokes? Is it just when they are used against your posts, or do you dislike them in general? At least FTFY is funny sometimes, unlike 99.9% of overlord jokes. So is it just the lame FTFY jokes you have the issue with, or is it your contention that the entire class of FTFY jokes is lame? And when you say that they are lame, do you mean that they are unfunny, or perhaps they are hobbled, limping, maybe even gimpy? If it is the latter, perhaps they are deserving of pity rather than scorn and should be modded up instead - affirmative action for the lame.
I can see the sigs now - 'Any differently-abled "Fixed that for you" jokes will be extended a helping hand.'
The Neverending Story (Michael Ende) - HIGHLY recommend this one.
That book is nothing short of brilliant. Certainly one of the most addictive books I have ever read. His other famous work, Momo (The Grey Gentlemen) is also great.
Now, take these intelligent human beings that study prehistoric times. Given the fact that it actually requires an abundance of gray matter to figure stuff like this out, as well as a lot of time to do the research and field work, these individuals could easily be tasked to do something important.
You'd liberate far more of these people if you could somehow nuke slashdot. Yeah, yeah, I know you'd have to destroy kuroshin, digg, and every other internet forum - users would just migrate there for their fix. And the software to create internet forums would need to be taken down too - good luck - try and destroy something with an open source license, it would be like trying to eradicate herpes. And then you'd need to eliminate pr0n. And every computer game. And chess. And cards. And paper. Never mind.
I never buy a product that doesn't have at least one review panning it.
I do - on amazon. Some products are just that good (and I do look at the bad reviews as well). But that's only after I have read every review and determined if the reviews seem real to me. If each is in detail and in a lot of different "voices", I deem those reviews real. It's basically the same technique a teacher uses to assess a student's book report - has he read the book or just the blurb? The answer is in the level of detail.
However, number of reviews is generally a good proxy for reliability of rating (at least, on amazon). A 1 review 5 star rating says virtually nothing about a product. A 15 review 4.5 star item would usually be a better purchase (assuming there is no 5 star item with similar review numbers). It would be useful if they had another way to sort through items that combined rating with reliability of rating, e.g. likely minimum rating. It would be dead easy to mine their data and determine a function that takes the rating and number of reviews (perhaps also using number of words/review as a proxy for detail, but don't let on that to the general public, otherwise sellers will start gaming this) to determine what minimum rating (within say, an 80-90% confidence level) a product will have after it has 30+ reviews. Then it's a simple matter of mapping (avg. rating, number of reviews, ) -> minimum rating. I believe this would be more useful to the consumer than the existing options of sorting by pure rating, bestselling, etc.
I have no idea whether the growth in jobs is matched by the growth in programmer numbers in those areas. Also any new languages/frameworks/whatever are probably going to grow like crazy if they are any good. But even among web frameworks it seems that the growth of the top 3 is exceptional. Drupal, Ruby on Rails and Django are still top. (I added a bunch more from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_frameworks). That's not to say that the most popular language/database/web framework/whatever are the best. e.g. I'd never willingly use mysql over postgresql, even though there are way more mysql jobs. Growth rate is the same however. Another factor is the payscale. If you were after money you'd pick a language that is both well paid and growing at a rapid rate. Intuitively, a more powerful but harder to use language should pay more because the supply is more limited.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a MacBook Air for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Thinkpad T60 running Ubuntu, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its non-Mac counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My eeePC 701 runs faster than this 2.13GHz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
I have used ATI cards under Linux since the mach64 chipset was popular. You folks who can't get ATI drivers to work either can't read the documentation, or have no business mucking around on a command line. It is not that difficult.
Posting AC because you are so l33t? I know my way around a command line. I've gotten all sorts of difficult crap working in Linux. I've written step by step howtos for things. And I got the BLOB ATI driver to work perfectly the first time (well, everything bar not tearing, which was impossible with that driver). To do so I had to hack xorg.conf because the resolution I had (1920*1080) was not detected or supported without a custom xorg.conf. After probably no more than a day (maybe less - I can't even remember how long it took me) I managed to get it working.
So then I read that a new driver had fixed tearing, so I wanted to try it. Couldn't get it to work, couldn't get the original to work with my resolution, and couldn't get the two FOSS drivers to work either. I read all documentation available, I read logs, I read through probably 30+ pages (may have been way more than that - when I have a problem I read through EVERYTHING remotely related I can possibly google, even if hundreds of pages) of forums at phoronix and tried everything they said, and anywhere else I could find using google (e.g. ubuntuforums.org, and others). Still no dice, and loads of people having the same unresolved problem on phoronix. With more work I probably would have gotten it out. But at some point I have to place a value on my time. Getting a low end NVIDIA card cost me $40 and installed faster than it took to download or travel to the store to get it.
I do have confidence that ATI/FOSS community will eventually get things working well. Hopefully my small financial contribution helped to further that effort a little.
Now the drivers for it have killed my linux completely, black screen with artefacts replaces the login screen and I can't rescue it from a login shell because ubuntu disabled the root password. Rather pathetic that they didn't account for the removal by implementing the option to log in with your normal username (I'm talking about in the recovery mode shell-login here)
There's got to be something you can do to rescue it, surely - at least to the point where a full reinstall is not necessary. livecd?
I learned the hard way that when you finally manage to get an ATI driver working satisfactorily in Linux do not under any circumstances fail to have a ghosted copy of the HDD made before you install a newer version of the driver. You will not be able to remember the exact moon phase, breed of goat or sacrificial incantation necessary to get the thing working again, trust me. In the end I bought a very cheap NVIDIA. The worst thing about it is that I idealistically bought all AMD/ATI to support the decision to open source the driver. As a result I felt a little bad about making the crack, but the potential for the funny was too hard to resist. Perhaps the joke is somewhat on the mark as it seems a year later some people are still having difficulty with the ATI linux drivers. When I install a new version of Ubuntu (probably next LTS), I will try to get the ATI card working out of principle (reinstall from scratch should be a lot easier). Until then I'm not going to throw another week of my life at the problem.
I honestly don't mean any disrespect to AMD/ATI, some things are hard, some things take time. This is surely one of them. I sincerely wish them the best of luck with their efforts and will continue to buy AMD/ATI wherever possible.
What the article didn't see fit to mention is that the combination of wooden NVIDIA card and NVIDIA Linux driver still outperform the equivalent production ATI card and ATI Linux driver.
Yep. That part is relatively easy. The harder part is assembling it all in one place (and maybe a distant second, deciding what is a duplicate and what to keep/delete so that a complete record is built up).
Methinks you doth protest too much. Surely keeping the bible in a language that only appointed priests could understand and have access to learning worked to the benefit of those priests and the people who had influence in appointing them (King, and Pope). The breaking up of this monopoly was a direct result of the invention of the printing press - which allowed plain English/German/Dutch/French translations to be mass produced for the first time. This caused bloody wars all over Europe. http://www.williamtyndale.com/0biblehistory.htm
That being said, I'm not really convinced by the grandparent. I am not a lawyer but I do know that modern civilization with large populations is a very complicated thing. I don't believe it can run without a legal system that can cope with complex situations and come up with a ruling that at least largely works (or keeps some semblance of order). The language needs to be exact so that it can be interpreted accurately, hence, legalese has evolved. It is not comprehensible to the average Joe. However, because it is exact, a trained lawyer can interpret it and give a legal opinion that will probably be correct. A smart person usually has a good idea of right and wrong working through legalese - it just takes a long time. Even most libertarians are not so removed from Earth as to suggest that society can do away with courts (or military, or police). Whatever would be in place of the rules to stop people doing things that cause other people harm (usually having some sort of market basis) need to be exact enough.
The same is true of software. There is no silver bullet that will enable people with average joe levels of intelligence to code software. The language used needs to be precise; there is no way around it. To get to the point where we can type in English "construct me a game where I run around and shoot things and have lots of fun" and have the computer pop out the next Crysis after compiling for a bit... for that we need strong AI. Until then we have an array of cryptic English-based languages, unintelligible to the layman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
So if you value your country's sovereignty in the least, consider the threat real. Many want to eliminate The Pirate Bay's every chance of asylum.
I think it's relatively unlikely that there won't be some sort of movement by those with power to counter the lack of control caused by the internet. We are seeing that now. It would not surprise me if the media mafia kept up the full court press until every last country folds. They have plenty of money and power.
OTOH, their enemies are getting something they formerly paid for, for nothing. Not much money to fight with there. Do they have any allies with an income stream? ISPs are a natural ally - they are not stupid. Without media downloads, porn is the only thing really driving large cap high bandwidth accounts. Sure, a lot of people download a lot of porn, but I'm sure the ISPs would be giving up a large chunk of income if the MPAA were able to shut down torrents of movie downloads.
If the MPAA were to succeed with shutting down torrenting, it's not even the end of technological improvement. We just head towards some sort of darknet. But I suppose that the longer torrents are fairly easy to find and download, the more people come to expect media for free, the more entrenched is the file sharing culture, and the more potential Bram Cohens there will be to code up technological solutions in their spare time. So I suppose this delaying action does serve a purpose.
If the MPAA could even defeat that somehow, cost/GB keeps dropping and local transfer rates keep increasing. We'd have a scene kind of like a souped up version of 1980s tape copying. Except you'd be able to copy the entire year's output of the entertainment industry in a few hours. The only real problem then is converting the media to a DRM free digital version and assembling it in one place.
Wow, is that bzipped? How large is it uncompressed?
Of course it's bzipped - but I'm not sure what the compression ratio is for Python. I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't fork it. And be careful when examining the Python, it has been known to generate streams of Perl. You'd rather not get it on you - it is, after all, a glue language.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not apparent. Dollars to donuts it's far cheaper to send an email targeting a specific bank to a very large number of harvested US email addresses than to somehow find out which email addresses relate to which bank's customers, and send them a targeted email. Emails cost virtually nothing to send.
In the muscle tissue itself? On the surface and in the intestinal tract, yes. The meat the hamburger begins "life" as should be sterile. Of course, in the process of being ground up the meat will receive a small amount of bacteria from the surfaces of the equipment and the air, but those surfaces would be washed regularly.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=291225
So the prison soundsystem would finish playing the_marriage_of_figaro.flac?
Of course $MEDIA will be used for ideological content if the media is powerful enough. Every developer with an opinion has the potential to imbue their game with their ideological or political inclination. All you need is text to embed political content, e.g. all you would really need is a terminal, which have been around forever. Of course, for political content to do much there must be a sizable audience.
Just off the top of my head, Theatre Europe for c64 had political content (e.g. anti-nuclear war) back in 1986. I'm sure this wasn't the first game with political content by any stretch of the imagination, just a random one from my youth that springs to mind. Virtually any war game where you can be cast only as one side in a historical war could be considered political. Chances are there were somewhat political games created in the 1970s, just the audience was limited. I'd be interested to know what the first such game was.
Well, yes. Maybe not recognizable as such, since heat can denature the proteins in the cell walls. If we are being that pedantic, I'll argue that since the cow is made up of molecules derived from grass, air and water, hamburgers are an acceptable part of a vegan diet.
No. But I puked the most at this:
In most places, they cook hamburger (which would destroy most vegetative bacterial cells); wherever this young lady is from they obviously must put the lettuce on the raw burger and then eat it. No wonder she wanted to leave there at all costs! Perhaps that's where she got the barbed wire scar from.
It's not as if there are heaps of these students. At the edges of the bell curve where the Ivy Leagues recruit from, there are only a relative few people produced every year. It's not as if MIT, Harvard et al can magically produce geniuses through their great teaching ability, they just select the cream of the crop.
If MIT wanted to differentiate some more, another standardized test would do just as well. The questions on average would need to be very hard, but with varying degrees of difficulty to distinguish accurately whether someone is IQ 135, 140, 145, 150, 155, 160... etc. Since SAT is just a proxy IQ test anyway.
In fact, this is basically a Microsoft style recruiting tool - AFAIK they use a few very hard questions to issue an IQ test. Since they are only after the very best, if you fail they weren't after you anyway, whether you scored 85 or 125, they don't care.
I'm curious - what do you have against FTFY jokes? Is it just when they are used against your posts, or do you dislike them in general? At least FTFY is funny sometimes, unlike 99.9% of overlord jokes. So is it just the lame FTFY jokes you have the issue with, or is it your contention that the entire class of FTFY jokes is lame? And when you say that they are lame, do you mean that they are unfunny, or perhaps they are hobbled, limping, maybe even gimpy? If it is the latter, perhaps they are deserving of pity rather than scorn and should be modded up instead - affirmative action for the lame.
I can see the sigs now - 'Any differently-abled "Fixed that for you" jokes will be extended a helping hand.'
If the walls are porous by design, should we care?
That book is nothing short of brilliant. Certainly one of the most addictive books I have ever read. His other famous work, Momo (The Grey Gentlemen) is also great.
You'd liberate far more of these people if you could somehow nuke slashdot. Yeah, yeah, I know you'd have to destroy kuroshin, digg, and every other internet forum - users would just migrate there for their fix. And the software to create internet forums would need to be taken down too - good luck - try and destroy something with an open source license, it would be like trying to eradicate herpes. And then you'd need to eliminate pr0n. And every computer game. And chess. And cards. And paper. Never mind.
I do - on amazon. Some products are just that good (and I do look at the bad reviews as well). But that's only after I have read every review and determined if the reviews seem real to me. If each is in detail and in a lot of different "voices", I deem those reviews real. It's basically the same technique a teacher uses to assess a student's book report - has he read the book or just the blurb? The answer is in the level of detail.
However, number of reviews is generally a good proxy for reliability of rating (at least, on amazon). A 1 review 5 star rating says virtually nothing about a product. A 15 review 4.5 star item would usually be a better purchase (assuming there is no 5 star item with similar review numbers). It would be useful if they had another way to sort through items that combined rating with reliability of rating, e.g. likely minimum rating. It would be dead easy to mine their data and determine a function that takes the rating and number of reviews (perhaps also using number of words/review as a proxy for detail, but don't let on that to the general public, otherwise sellers will start gaming this) to determine what minimum rating (within say, an 80-90% confidence level) a product will have after it has 30+ reviews. Then it's a simple matter of mapping (avg. rating, number of reviews, ) -> minimum rating. I believe this would be more useful to the consumer than the existing options of sorting by pure rating, bestselling, etc.
If they are looking to recruit Cybermen for their cyberorganization, they had better talk to John Lumic.
I know I already replied to this. But if you click "relative" you get an idea of the growth in language jobs (though I suspect that the y axis needs to be logarithmic). On a whim I decided to include web frameworks too. e.g. Django, ruby on rails. SQL and C are still on top (followed by VBA) in the absolute, but in relative Ruby on Rails and Django appear to smoke everything else.
absolute: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=c%2C+java%2C+perl%2C+php%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+sql%2C+postgresql%2C+mysql%2C+django%2C+ruby+rails%2C+cobol%2C+assembler%2C+MATLAB%2C+VBA+visual+basic&l=
relative: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=c%2C+java%2C+perl%2C+php%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+sql%2C+postgresql%2C+mysql%2C+django%2C+ruby+rails%2C+cobol%2C+assembler%2C+MATLAB%2C+VBA+visual+basic&l=&relative=1
I have no idea whether the growth in jobs is matched by the growth in programmer numbers in those areas. Also any new languages/frameworks/whatever are probably going to grow like crazy if they are any good. But even among web frameworks it seems that the growth of the top 3 is exceptional. Drupal, Ruby on Rails and Django are still top. (I added a bunch more from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_frameworks). That's not to say that the most popular language/database/web framework/whatever are the best. e.g. I'd never willingly use mysql over postgresql, even though there are way more mysql jobs. Growth rate is the same however. Another factor is the payscale. If you were after money you'd pick a language that is both well paid and growing at a rapid rate. Intuitively, a more powerful but harder to use language should pay more because the supply is more limited.
relative: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=django%2C+ruby+rails%2C+zend%2C+zope%2C+pylons%2C+symfony%2C+cakephp%2C+drupal%2C+fuse%2C+turbogears&l=&relative=1
absolute: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=django%2C+ruby+rails%2C+zend%2C+zope%2C+pylons%2C+symfony%2C+cakephp%2C+drupal%2C+fuse%2C+turbogears&l=
This site is pretty cool too.
http://www.hotscripts.com/blog/determining-programming-language-popularity/
Add SQL to the list and it beats even C.
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=c%2C+java%2C+perl%2C+php%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+sql&l=
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a MacBook Air for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Thinkpad T60 running Ubuntu, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its non-Mac counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My eeePC 701 runs faster than this 2.13GHz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Posting AC because you are so l33t? I know my way around a command line. I've gotten all sorts of difficult crap working in Linux. I've written step by step howtos for things. And I got the BLOB ATI driver to work perfectly the first time (well, everything bar not tearing, which was impossible with that driver). To do so I had to hack xorg.conf because the resolution I had (1920*1080) was not detected or supported without a custom xorg.conf. After probably no more than a day (maybe less - I can't even remember how long it took me) I managed to get it working.
So then I read that a new driver had fixed tearing, so I wanted to try it. Couldn't get it to work, couldn't get the original to work with my resolution, and couldn't get the two FOSS drivers to work either. I read all documentation available, I read logs, I read through probably 30+ pages (may have been way more than that - when I have a problem I read through EVERYTHING remotely related I can possibly google, even if hundreds of pages) of forums at phoronix and tried everything they said, and anywhere else I could find using google (e.g. ubuntuforums.org, and others). Still no dice, and loads of people having the same unresolved problem on phoronix. With more work I probably would have gotten it out. But at some point I have to place a value on my time. Getting a low end NVIDIA card cost me $40 and installed faster than it took to download or travel to the store to get it.
I do have confidence that ATI/FOSS community will eventually get things working well. Hopefully my small financial contribution helped to further that effort a little.
There's got to be something you can do to rescue it, surely - at least to the point where a full reinstall is not necessary. livecd?
I learned the hard way that when you finally manage to get an ATI driver working satisfactorily in Linux do not under any circumstances fail to have a ghosted copy of the HDD made before you install a newer version of the driver. You will not be able to remember the exact moon phase, breed of goat or sacrificial incantation necessary to get the thing working again, trust me. In the end I bought a very cheap NVIDIA. The worst thing about it is that I idealistically bought all AMD/ATI to support the decision to open source the driver. As a result I felt a little bad about making the crack, but the potential for the funny was too hard to resist. Perhaps the joke is somewhat on the mark as it seems a year later some people are still having difficulty with the ATI linux drivers. When I install a new version of Ubuntu (probably next LTS), I will try to get the ATI card working out of principle (reinstall from scratch should be a lot easier). Until then I'm not going to throw another week of my life at the problem.
I honestly don't mean any disrespect to AMD/ATI, some things are hard, some things take time. This is surely one of them. I sincerely wish them the best of luck with their efforts and will continue to buy AMD/ATI wherever possible.
What the article didn't see fit to mention is that the combination of wooden NVIDIA card and NVIDIA Linux driver still outperform the equivalent production ATI card and ATI Linux driver.
Only somewhat?
Yep. That part is relatively easy. The harder part is assembling it all in one place (and maybe a distant second, deciding what is a duplicate and what to keep/delete so that a complete record is built up).
Methinks you doth protest too much. Surely keeping the bible in a language that only appointed priests could understand and have access to learning worked to the benefit of those priests and the people who had influence in appointing them (King, and Pope). The breaking up of this monopoly was a direct result of the invention of the printing press - which allowed plain English/German/Dutch/French translations to be mass produced for the first time. This caused bloody wars all over Europe. http://www.williamtyndale.com/0biblehistory.htm
In fact, the wars to bring about the monopoly in the first place under Charles the Great were pretty bloody also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Verden
That being said, I'm not really convinced by the grandparent. I am not a lawyer but I do know that modern civilization with large populations is a very complicated thing. I don't believe it can run without a legal system that can cope with complex situations and come up with a ruling that at least largely works (or keeps some semblance of order). The language needs to be exact so that it can be interpreted accurately, hence, legalese has evolved. It is not comprehensible to the average Joe. However, because it is exact, a trained lawyer can interpret it and give a legal opinion that will probably be correct. A smart person usually has a good idea of right and wrong working through legalese - it just takes a long time. Even most libertarians are not so removed from Earth as to suggest that society can do away with courts (or military, or police). Whatever would be in place of the rules to stop people doing things that cause other people harm (usually having some sort of market basis) need to be exact enough.
The same is true of software. There is no silver bullet that will enable people with average joe levels of intelligence to code software. The language used needs to be precise; there is no way around it. To get to the point where we can type in English "construct me a game where I run around and shoot things and have lots of fun" and have the computer pop out the next Crysis after compiling for a bit... for that we need strong AI. Until then we have an array of cryptic English-based languages, unintelligible to the layman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
I think it's relatively unlikely that there won't be some sort of movement by those with power to counter the lack of control caused by the internet. We are seeing that now. It would not surprise me if the media mafia kept up the full court press until every last country folds. They have plenty of money and power.
OTOH, their enemies are getting something they formerly paid for, for nothing. Not much money to fight with there. Do they have any allies with an income stream? ISPs are a natural ally - they are not stupid. Without media downloads, porn is the only thing really driving large cap high bandwidth accounts. Sure, a lot of people download a lot of porn, but I'm sure the ISPs would be giving up a large chunk of income if the MPAA were able to shut down torrents of movie downloads.
If the MPAA were to succeed with shutting down torrenting, it's not even the end of technological improvement. We just head towards some sort of darknet. But I suppose that the longer torrents are fairly easy to find and download, the more people come to expect media for free, the more entrenched is the file sharing culture, and the more potential Bram Cohens there will be to code up technological solutions in their spare time. So I suppose this delaying action does serve a purpose.
If the MPAA could even defeat that somehow, cost/GB keeps dropping and local transfer rates keep increasing. We'd have a scene kind of like a souped up version of 1980s tape copying. Except you'd be able to copy the entire year's output of the entertainment industry in a few hours. The only real problem then is converting the media to a DRM free digital version and assembling it in one place.
Yeah! If we could pull that off, it would be a literal coup!
Of course it's bzipped - but I'm not sure what the compression ratio is for Python. I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't fork it. And be careful when examining the Python, it has been known to generate streams of Perl. You'd rather not get it on you - it is, after all, a glue language.